In recent years social networking has become very popular as a way of allowing people to connect and communicate with each other, and share both information about themselves and digital content through the internet and over great distances. Sites such as Facebook and MySpace allow users to post information about their interests and activities for others to read, and to read the information that others have posted. Thus, users are able to provide information to a large number of people by posting only once, rather than having to communicate directly with each other person with whom it is desired to share information.
However, these types of sites are typically set up such that people must establish a connection with one another before they may view each other's information, so that communication and sharing information is generally limited to being between people who already know each other. Thus, while these sites allow people to find out about the interests of people they already know, they do not allow people to find others based solely upon their common interests.
A number of dating sites allow people to indicate interests, and provide various ways of matching up strangers. However, these sites expressly include demographic data (sex, age, race, marital status, education, employment, etc.) and physical attributes as part of their matching algorithms. In addition to this, it is believed that the scope and type of matching is limited, for example allowing a user only to designate one or more of a small number of very broad categories; for example, Yahoo Personals lists such categories as arts, family, travel, cooking, outdoor activities, playing sports, etc. As a result, these sites are typically not specific enough to be well suited to finding people of common specific interests, even ignoring the potential presumptions of romantic interest by their users.
While the internet may make it easier in some ways to find people of similar interests, for example by searching for a club, organization or user forum related to a specified subject, there does not appear to be any easily available means of searching for individuals who share an interest with a user.